Disk drives are commonly employed in workstations, personal computers, portables and other computer systems to store large amounts of data in a readily available form. One class of disk drive in use today is the miniaturized disk drive, such as those having disk diameters of 1.8 inches or less which provide for storage of data in increasingly smaller and more portable electronic equipment, such as cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDA).
The small size of the miniaturized disk drives, however, mandates extra precision in their assembly, particularly in light of their correspondingly miniaturized components. To reduce the occurrence of human error during the assembly process, manufacturers may need to increasingly rely on the use of automated devices, such as assembly robots, for assembling the miniaturized disk drives. The assembly process for the drives, however, may require that the drives be transported from one assembly station to another. This movement of partially assembled drives during the various stages of the manufacturing process increases the susceptibility of the drives to adverse external influences, such as making them increasingly vulnerable to electrostatic discharges (ESD). As such, considerable care must be exercised during the movement of the disk drives to guard against such influences, resulting in added delay, cost and other overhead in the assembly of the miniaturized disk drives. As the automated assembly process is intended for high volume production, the foregoing transportation overhead becomes an increasing concern.
Accordingly, what is needed is a method for reducing the foregoing transportation overhead during the assembly of miniaturized disk drives.